Trial Description

Title

Emotional competences of patients with chronic pain in a specialized institution (ECOP)

Trial Acronym

ECOP

URL of the Trial

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Brief Summary in Lay Language

This study helps to examine the emotional competences of people with chronic pain more closely. Our concern is to find out how well people with chronic pain attending a pain management programm are able to identify, understand, express, regulate and actively use emotions. In addition, we want to investigate how much influence emotional competences have on the therapy outcome. For that purpose we will use different questionnaires and tests.

Brief Summary in Scientific Language

Although everyone experiences emotions, the extent to which we are able to identify emotions, to understand them, to express, to regulate and actively use our own emotion varies interpersonally (Mayer et al., 2004, 2008).
Aim of this study is to explore the emotional competences of patients with chronic pain in a specialized institution and its influence on the therapy outcome.
How well do patients with chronic pain compared to the normal population perceive their emotions, name, express, regulate, accept and use them for themselves? How do patients attending an interdisciplinary outpatient treatment evaluate their emotional skills themselves? Would therapists appraise emotional competences similarly? How about the emotional skills of patients being in a specialized institution when those skills are assessed by a performance test? Do emotional competences change in the course of interdisciplinary multimodal pain therapy? In which way do emotional competences of patients in an interdisciplinary multimodal pain therapy influence the treatment success? Do reports of patients and therapists differ in their predictive value for the therapy outcome?
The investigation includes adult patients with chronic, non-tumor-pain (head, back and joint pain), who attend the outpatient interdisciplinary multimodal pain therapy setting of the univerity clinic pain centre Dresden (USC). The treatment consists of a 4-week period for the main treatment and one refresher week after 10 weeks. In addition to medical care, patients go to physiotherapeutic, psychotherapeutic and art therapy groups. Data collection is managed by continuous evaluation of the interdisciplinary multimodal pain therapy of the USC and their influence factors.
This study is an exploratory study with descriptive observational and methodic units.
Primary parameters are the emotional competence and the underlying emotional intelligence. Secondary parameters are therapy outcomes of the interdisciplinary multimodal pain therapy (catastrophization, acceptance, quality of life, depression, anxiety, pain intensity and pain impairment) and the type of assessing emotional competence (self-assessment, external assessment, performance test). By means of questionnaires (Self- and external rating scales of the German emotional-competence- questionnaire - EKF (Rindermann, 2009), self-report instrument for the assessment of emotion-specific regulation skills ERSQ-ES (Ebert et al., 2012), Pain Catastrophizing Scale (PCS, Meyer et al. 2008), Chronic Pain Acceptance questionnaire (German version, CPAQ-D, Nilges et al. 2007), Short Form 12 (Bullinger and Kirchberger, 1998), Depression Anxiety and Stress Scales (DASS; Nilges and Essau, 2015), German version of Chronic Pain Grading Questionnaire - CPGQ (Klasen et al., 2004)) and a performance test (Mayer-Salovey-Caruso emotional intelligence - MSCEIT (Steinmayr et al., 2011)) associated target parameters will be quantified. A priori calculations yield a necessary total sample size of N = 206. From the above sample a subgroup of n = 56 is going to complete the performance test MSCEIT.
Parametric procedure for testing difference hypotheses (variance analyse with measurement repetition) and related hypotheses (regression and correlation) are foreseen depending on quality of data. With an expected average effect size and α level of 5% a power of 90% is planned. In the course of multiple testing, an alpha error accumulation is prevented by a Bonferroni adjustment. The evaluation is done by means of the statistics software IBM SPSS 21.